Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.
Wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation.
Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.
Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings, but when they do, soar out of sight.
Love is the strongest kind of army because it generates no resistance.
You should start your life with the illusion that you are completely in control of what you do. You should finish life with the recognition that, all in all, you got better than you deserved.
Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed, when we come into contact with people we admire and love and we consciously and unconsciously bend our lives to mimic theirs.
The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small.
Same confidence that can lead to daring and creativity can lead to self-worship and arrogance.
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
Humility is a virtue of self-understanding in context, acquired by the practice of other centeredness.
We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.
You did it instead because you reordered your loves, and as Augustine says again and again, you become what you love.
The cognitive sciences have replaced literature as the way many people attempt to understand their own minds.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
Thankfulness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, “is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.
The paper was Catholic, but she embraced a philosophy of personalism, which is an affirmation of the dignity of each person,
Plato believed the soul was divided into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. Reason seeks truth and wants the best for the whole person. Spirit seeks recognition and glory. Appetite seeks base pleasures.
Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Tried to raise money for him, to enhance
Always take your job seriously, never yourself.
We really do have dappled souls.
Government is not the only solution, but it is also not the only problem.
The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born.
Therefore caution is the proper attitude, an awareness of the limits the foundation of wisdom.
When unattached to the right ends, communities can be more barbarous than individuals.
Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half-truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but
Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives.
We’re not bad. But we are morally inarticulate.
In her memoirs she writes that she left the hospital job because it eventually made her numb to suffering, and it left her no time to write. She neglected
First, they had good character. They were energetic, honest, and dependable. They were persistent after setbacks and acknowledged their mistakes.
Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.
Sin is also a necessary piece of our mental furniture because sin is communal, while error is individual.
Montaigne’s example teaches that if you have realistically low expectations, you’ll end up pleased in most circumstances.
You should ask certain questions: What is the purpose of my life? What do I want from life? What are the things that I truly value, that are not done just to please or impress the people around me?
He subsumed his own desires for the sake of the group.
When he felt a surge of hatred, he refused to let it rule him. “Anger cannot win. It cannot even think clearly,
Too. “My desire for you is a painful rather than pleasurable emotion,
Happiness is not found in self contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.
To favor the short term over the long term, the lower over
Our culture has made it harder to be good,
The less you agree with the policies of your superiors, the more energy you must direct to their accomplishment.
Agency is not automatic. It has to be given birth to, with pushing and effort.
